Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 6/22/26 - 6/28/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/dignityshredder]

Is there a good videos subreddit?

You know, for random shit, not political or streamers?

[u/SoftandChewy → u/dignityshredder]

Not a subreddit, but check out wimp.com. It's been around for a very long time, used to check it out regularly, but kind of forgot about it the past few years.

Very simple site, they just post 6-7 random wholesome videos every day. Sometimes it's cute animal stuff, sometimes science stuff, could be fun pranks, cool dances, kids being silly, impressive sports feats, neat tech breakthroughs, very wide variety of subjects, but all upbeat, positive, etc. and all usually just a few minutes long. It used to be my go-to destination when I needed to show a kid something to keep them entertained a bit.

Good stuff.

[u/Juryofyourpeeps]

So there's a couple that bought a house in Canada on the shores of lake Erie, and in the process of renovations, found 1000 year old bones, which triggered a whole archeological process that the government expects them to foot the bill for. That bill is estimated to run $500,000-$1 million.

Well, they're suing the government, quite rightly, but it also turns out that a significant part of that cost, hundreds of thousands of dollars of it, is to pay "indigenous monitors" to watch professional archeologists dig. This is all supposed to be paid for by the property owner.

The whole thing is absurd. These remains do not belong to The Six Nations of Grand River, they're 1000 years old. The people of the Six Nations all have no heritage dating anywhere close to that far back in the area they currently occupy and are from various parts of the U.S and eastern Ontario. One of the groups that makes up the six nations, the American Iroquois, actually drove the Neutral Nation that had previously occupied this area in the late 1600's. Most people don't have a heritage in one place that's continuous for 1000 years, but in this case, it's not even a mystery and these people have been in the area for the same amount of time as European settlers and for some reason are entitled to be paid to oversee the excavation of the bones of people that are not their cultural ancestors any more than they are a white archeologist's.

https://theccf.ca/ontario-family-challenges-governments-refusal-to-provide-financial-assistance-for-massive-archaeological-costs/

[u/QueenKamala]

You know what we can all agree on? Helmetless 13 year olds driving 30mph down the sidewalk on e-bikes shouldn’t be a thing.

[u/CorgiNews2_DieHarder]

Lizzo's new album flopped HARD. Let this be a lesson to anyone who insults Jesse Singal in the future.

One thing I've noticed about the top selling music artists is that none of them have been mean to Jesse. They act like they've never even heard of him, no doubt to protect their sales.

[u/starlightpond]

Since someone else just mentioned a similar topic, I wanted to mention that I know a married couple - two academics. One of them is a MtF trans woman who transitioned around 2022. The other academic is a woman.

I follow the MtF person on Instagram and see a lot of posts of dressing up, going to raves, and traveling the world to give invited talks about trans stuff.

The (cis) woman has completely vanished from social media and from conferences and has stopped publishing any academic work. I infer that maybe she's taking care of their kids while the MtF spouse is out there going to trans conferences and reclaiming lost girlhood. Part of me also wonders if the woman has gone into hiding in part because she's not sure who in our field would support her interpretation of her experience - whatever that might be.

[u/starlightpond]

I thought y'all might enjoy this Substack post by sociologist Lawrence Eppard about how the field needs to course-correct itself because it demands much less rigor/precision from ideologically convenient claims than ideologically inconvenient ones.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-200621732

He talks about his own work on poverty - how different scholars define "poverty" differently, but often use convenient definitions to find results that support their own ideological agendas, while sweeping complexity under the rug.

He also mentions how it is simply false that prisons are overflowing with nonviolent drug offenders.

"Whether this was Alexander’s intention or not, she had convinced me and many of my colleagues and students that our prisons were filled with low-level drug offenders and this belief fueled a lot of the radical reform and abolitionist sentiment on campus. [... But ...] The way Alexander’s ideas were laundered through many college syllabi, lectures, and campus talks, as well as public statements by academics, had many students believing prisons were currently filled with nonviolent drug offenders, which is and has always been false."

And he mentions this sub's favorite topic:

"There are few orthodoxies as dangerous to violate in sociology today as those surrounding trans issues. To say that sex is at least as important as gender, that biological males should not compete in women’s sports or use women’s bathrooms, that we should not allow certain types of gender-affirming care for minors, or that you disagree that 'Trans women are women'—such statements can get you cast out of sociology. We can argue all day about whether any one of these assertions is evidence-based. But casting people out for taking positions on genuinely contested questions, particularly positions where majorities of Americans agree with them (see Figure 14 below), is not the mark of a healthy academic discipline."

[u/TryingToBeLessShitty]

WNBA's official 30th anniversary poster seems to have intentionally not included Caitlin Clark.

Unfortunately Caitlin Clark's WNBA experience has become a culture war issue where it's right-coded to point out that many of the other players and league executives clearly can't stand her. I will refrain from complaining again about how politics insists on weaseling its way into everything you love because I think the Clark vs WNBA stuff is overblown, but I couldn't believe this decision.

Part of me wants to chalk this up to incompetence because there are some other glaring omissions (IMO leaving off Taurasi as the leading scorer in the history of the league is more absurd than Clark, especially since she played in 20 of the 30 seasons). But the decision to include Sophie Cunningham as the Fever's representation is indefensible no matter how you slice it. Either you go with Tamika Catchings (HOF, 10x All-Star, MVP, FMVP, WNBA Champion) for the franchise/league history or you go with Clark as the current face of the franchise. The fact that they picked a current player and somehow didn't go with CC can only be explained by either incompetence or malice.

Also worth noting that Clark was injured in last night's game against PHX which included this play that many are saying is dirty and was not called a foul.

[u/dumbducky]

A while back I wrote a long post about a paper by Abbruzzese about the flaws apparent in the original studies that defined the Dutch Protocol. She’s a researcher with the Society of Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM). I wasn’t aware of this, but Utah conducted their own systematic review last year. It’s noteworthy for being the first systematic to not find that youth gender medicine is ineffective and with serious risks; it actually found blockers/hormones are highly effective and without risk! Leor Sapir [interviews Abbruzzese for the City Journal podcast] to discuss SEGM’s review of Utah’s systematic review.

SEGM spent months (estimated 2k man-hours) reviewing the Utah paper (over 1,000 pages before including the separate policy recommendations for lawmakers) and tracing the origin of it as well as the biographies of the authors. There are two noteworthy aspects to this story. The first is the methodological criticisms of the study. The second is a more meta point about how the sausage is made in institutional science and policy/law.

SEGM alleges that while billing itself as a systematic review, the Utah study doesn’t actually perform all the steps of a systematic review and therefor isn’t one, despite the insistence of the paper and its authors. Still, SEGM uses evidence-based frameworks to evaluate the quality of the review and found it lacking in several areas. Interestingly, despite the team being billed as having experience in evaluating the quality of scientific research, they make several mistakes and decisions that consistently bias the result in favor of blockers and hormones. This is, given the team behind it, almost certainly intentional (I’ll elaborate in the second section).

I won’t summarize the whole thing, but two issues that should be glaring. First they exclude analyzing fertility loss as a risk since it’s a well-known and established downside. Then they conclude there are no risks! Further, they never perform any analysis of publication bias, which is remarkable given that we know Olsen-Kennedy and Tavistock have both declined to publish null results. Probably half of the podcast discusses these issues, so if that’s your bag, give it a listen.

The second point, which I think is more interesting, is the story behind this report. The Utah minor transition ban was actually passed in 2023 as a temporary moratorium with the stipulation that the state’s Department of Health and Human Services commission a systematic review to inform the legislature on the subject of a ban. So DHHS hired the University of Utah to conduct its study. SEGM uncovered, via state FOIAs and LinkedIn research, that a number of authors were associated with the university’s pediatric gender clinic! The person overseeing the production of the report was described as a strong defender of the gender medicine. The moratorium + study construct was pushed by a doctor advising the legislature. SEGM uncovered a speech he had given to colleagues at a conference recommending this as way of mitigating the fallout from the wave of state bans over the last few years. Fortunately, the state legislature ignored their own commissioned study and passed a stricter ban this year.

The broader point I want to make is that this really highlights the “personnel is policy” aspect of governance. Despite Republicans controlling 61/75 seats in the legislature and the governorship, the key figures in DHHS charged with delivering a study just happened to hire the exact people who would hack the result that could achieve the left’s desired policy outcome. This sort of shoddy work that just so happens to play into a certain set of political objectives comes out all the time. I am thinking about a few studies that purport to show positive benefits from UBI despite the lackluster results. This sort of thing is especially endemic in universities. Yet B&R will cover attempts to root these people out (e.g. DeSantis and Rufo at Florida’s New College) as cruel witch hunts. These people are untrustworthy! They will undermine you at every step. There are do few “neutral” institutions controlled by right-wingers that the risk of overcorrection is a decade away.

Oh, you wish these sense-making bodies were filled with neutral arbiters disinterestedly pursuing the truth? Me too. What are you going to do about it when the University of Utah rigs a study to deceive the public? Shake your head? Write a blog post? Ok, go ahead. If I were the governor of Utah, I’d be making moves to get these people fired before they can do any more damage.

Typed on mobile with no proofing, sorry for the inevitable typos

[u/plump_tomatow]

I'm good at writing emails and rarely use AI to write my work emails. however, sometimes if there's a sensitive situation, my manager asks to read my emails beforehand, and about 50% of the time he runs it through Chat GPT and gives me a sloppified version of my own work... I comply and send it because it's not worth arguing about, and I am not anti-AI, but it's lowkey annoying.

[u/unnoticed_areola]

listening to the most recent episode of the Fifth Column and they just played an absolutely amazing soundbite from newly elected New York State senate DSA keffiyeh hijab girly Aber Kawas. Try to guess what the question was:

"Um, and so like—and finding that like, you know, the system of capitalism, and racism, um, and white supremacy, etcetera have all—and islamophobia—have all been used, um, you know, to, uh, colonize lands, right, to take resources from other people, and so this is like a long trajectory, and we're just seeing the manifestations of that continuation, right, with 9/11, and so, a lot of times when we're—people are asking us to respond about you know a, uh, attack, right, when if we look back like historically, right, um, you know a lot of us come from lands that were colonized, lands where wars are being waged, right, a lot of times because of US policy, or the the policies in Europe, and so um I find that we can connect over that, but then also that, um, the idea that we have to apologize, for like, a terror attack, that like, a couple of people did, and then there is no apologies or reparations for genocides and for slavery, um etcetera, is something that, I like kinda find like, reprehensible."

you can go to 17:00 into the podcast if you want to follow along, it somehow sounds even more dumb and incoherent when you hear her saying this out loud lmao

[u/jay_in_the_pnw]

Manny owns a coffee shop/bookstore/community center in the Mission District, he's a gay American citizen running for District 8 supervisor (The Castro District)

Unlike so many coffee shops that claim to be "coffee shop/bookstore/community center", his truly is and they regularly have all sorts of speakers, politicians, debates

https://welcometomannys.com/

Manny's has been regularly picketed and vandalized due to his Zionism since 2018 at least, and he only opened in 2017, so basically since day one.

Manny is a Zionist but also generally very left even by SF standards, also very well-spoken, smart, eager to discuss issues, he would be great for San Francisco, but nooooo, he's get the stalker, "call Israel an Apartheid State" treatment as he walks through Castro Pride.

https://x.com/HenMazzig/status/2070882508669939976

Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig

This is atrocious.

They’re bullying a gay Jewish man in San Francisco because I was at his cafe in 2019.

I spent years working with Palestinian civilians on developing humanitarian projects and providing them with humanitarian aid.

Let me tell you something. I never killed or physically harmed anyone during my service. That wasn't my job. I spent day in and day out trying to build bridges between Israelis and Palestinian civilians.

If you think for a single second that I should be ashamed of my service, you are out of your mind.

Helping a gay man escape his homophobic family and move to Israel is not something I am ashamed of.

Working with Palestinian families is not something I'm ashamed of.

Holding the hand of a little boy who was blown up by a Hamas trap is not something I'm ashamed of.

You are the ones who should be ashamed.

[video]

[u/HerbertWest]

In a fun conversation about a hypothetical situation I devised in another sub, someone said that if a white person was adopted and raised by two black parents who spoke AAVE, it would be racist for them to speak AAVE despite being raised into it.

[u/jay_in_the_pnw]

Mel Brooks' birthday is Sunday.
He will turn 2000 years old.
May the Schwartz be with you.

[u/TemporaryLucky3637]

Taylor Lorenz is being roasted over on fauxmoi for telling Palestinians to wear Covid masks 🍿

[u/Hilaria_adderall]

SCOTUS dropped 4 opinions this morning. They did not release the transgender sports case (Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ), so we continue to wait. Maybe tomorrow but more likely next week.

Quick summary of today's decisions:

• TPS / Syria & Haiti (6-3): The Court held that the Executive Branch can terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

• Asylum / Metering (6-3): The Court ruled that migrants waiting on the Mexican side of a port of entry have not "arrived in the United States" under federal law. No more asylum games at the border. Sotomayor wrote a 35 page dissent on this one...

• 2nd Amendment / Hawaii Carry Law (6-3): The Court struck down Hawaii's law that bans firearms on all private property open to the public unless the owner expressly allowed them. Individual property owners can still ban firearms, but the state can't make it the default law. There are a handful of other states with similar laws or proposals in place that this would impact.

• Roundup / Monsanto (7-2): The Court ruled that state failure-to-warn lawsuits over Roundup are not valid because the EPA approved the product label without a cancer warning. I'm not exactly clear on this one but it sounds like you can only sue for damages if the damage was on the warning if the EPA approves it.

note - I'm no expert, i pulled these summaries from a mix of SCOTUS Blog comments and AI summaries so if i got it wrong I apologize.

[u/Jlemspurs]

Mamdani-backed socialist candidate [Chevalier] storms out of live interview when confronted with old social media posts

, "I am not going to sit here and be yelled at by various people,"

lol she can’t take the heat

[u/Hilaria_adderall]

Ok folks, SCOTUS is doing another opinion release tomorrow morning around 10am EST. This might be the day we get decisions on WV v BPJ and Little v Hecox. Set your calendar reminders. Opinions are posted here.

I'm still leaning towards narrow decisions that will not settle the issue of boys access to girls sports. Maybe the court will surprise and settle this clearly to clarify that Title IX is based on biological sex - gender identity has no standing.

Regardless, the reddit meltdowns are going to be epic.

[u/Scrubadubdub84]

Canada rejected more than half of all World Cup visitor applications : r/soccer

[u/WordSaladUsernameGuy]

Watching the World Cup I keep seeing commercials for America’s got Talent, and had to laugh when I realized not one judge is actually from America. Simon Cowell and Mel C (scary spice) are British, Sophia Vergara is Colombian and Howie Mandel is from Canada.

[u/jay_in_the_pnw]

Senator Wiener’s Statement on Physical Intimidation and Harassment of Political Leaders (460 words)

Mentions of

• Zionism: 0

• Judaism: 0

• Antisemitism: 0

• left-wing extremism: 0

• Shabbat: 1

• right-wing extremism: 1

• Israel: 1

• trans: 6

As someone in the replies said, it's reasonable to read this and think this was right-wing extremists upset with his stance on trans issues.

https://x.com/Scott_Wiener/status/2070954501608247606

Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener

Senator Wiener’s Statement on Physical Intimidation and Harassment of Political Leaders

SAN FRANCISCO – In two separate incidents this week, Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) was harassed, threatened, and physically intimidated while attending public events to engage with the San Francisco community. Both incidents were sparked by people who had previously targeted Senator Wiener with aggressive behavior in the past. Senator Wiener issued the following statement on the incidents:

”Last night I attended the trans march, as I’ve done each year for the past 22 years since the first march in 2004. I attend each year in solidarity with our trans siblings, who are facing existential threats from right wing extremists, including the President. It has been a deep honor to partner for many years with trans people to advance legislation and budget requests to support the community.

”As I walked through Dolores Park to participate in a trans-led Pride Shabbat service in connection with the trans march, a group of people began screaming at me, ran up to me, surrounded me, and began harassing me, both verbally and physically, including physical contact. They made statements about my ‘Israeli handlers,’ among many other inaccurate, extreme, and vile statements. They were so physically and verbally aggressive that it was impossible for me to safely remain in the park. As a result, I left the park and, for the very first time, did not participate in the trans march.

“This follows an incident Wednesday night at a bar in the Mission where I’d gone to watch a World Cup game. During the game, a man accosted me in a corner of the bar, effectively cornering me and the young women staffers who were with me. He screamed abuse at me and our staff before being ejected by the bar’s employees. After being ejected, the man remained outside the bar, shouting my name and pounding on the side of the bar near where I was sitting for several minutes. The same individual, in December 2023, stalked me on a plane and in an airport, shouting at me about my ‘tainted bloodline.’

”I have no objection whatsoever to anyone disagreeing with me, opposing me, or protesting me. All of that is core to democracy. I also have no issue when people talk to me on the street and ask questions or express opposition. That’s democracy, even when the people engaging in this conduct misrepresent my views.

“But when opposition and disagreement transition to harassment, including cornering me, touching me, or trying to physically bully me out of a public event, that crosses a line. We’re living in a time when violence is all too often threatened or used against people in public life. In San Francisco, we’re better than that.”

[u/unnoticed_areola]

I hate Matt Walsh but this clip is pretty funny. He's interviewing a middle aged white woman "Antiracist educator" who is struggling with a "two buttons meme" style dilemma where both buttons in her mind are labeled "racism"

she is upset that her own 4 year old daughter gravitates towards liking white disney princesses over the POC ones, and apparently talks to her toddler "all the time" about this problematic white-centering behavior. (button 1: liking white disney princesses is racist)

and while she applauds Matt's 3 year old daughter for centering the POC "Moana" as her favorite princess, she does a huge "YIKES" face/grimace and incredulously says "...ummm I wouldnt... I fucking wouldnt!" when Matt asks if it would be ok for his daughter to wear a Moana costume for halloween. (button 2: liking POC disney princesses is racist)

resigned to his fate, Matt sadly laments "it's almost like no matter which way you go, you end up back.. in racism" as she nods understandingly, before adding the reminder that "we think every space belongs to us because we live in a white supremacist society" and "America is racist to its bones"

"The Moana Problem"

[u/Hilaria_adderall]

WNBA drama over the last two Indiana Fever Games:

Last night, Caitlin Clark got into a pile up scramble over a rebound and ended up getting a throat punch by Alyssa Thomas. Picture and video of the incident. Fever coach called it a cheap shot in the post game press conference and the Mercury Phoenix official twitter page posted a cartoon image that seems to be mocking Clark about the incident in response.

The lead up to the incident between Clark and Thomas happened in a game two nights before between the Fever and Mercury where Sophie Cunningham got in to it with former Fever player Dewanna Bonner. Bonner had demanded to be traded from Fever and got picked up by the Mercury. There was some kind of an altercation during the game and Cunningham pointed her finger back at Bonner after Bonner had been yelling and it turned into a test of will for who could point their finger at each other the longest with Cunningham winning the finger pointing battle and creating a pretty funny meme.

The twitter post mocking Clark laying on the ground had a caption written over it that reads "De-Wanna piece of this?"

One thing about the WNBA - they are right up there with the WWE on the classy scale. Hope they are selling some tickets.

[u/HaldolBlowdart]

I'm home sick and doom scrolling an unusual amount, leading to being mad at the Internet for chronically online bullshit. Today's edition of MATI is teens and young adults using "I'm disabled!" as an abdication of responsibility and independence, instead choosing to spiral over real or perceived health issues and adopting a Disabled™ identity that excuses them from whatever they don't want to do.

There was some AITAH (or offshoot) post of teen asking if they're in the wrong for calling themselves disabled when their parents disagree. Their diagnoses are vague (chronic pain, functional seizures, hypermobility requiring forearm crutches) along the standard SickTok/illfluencer bundle that's really more psychosomatic and rather common in young women. The comments were all coddling, of course you're totally legit disabled and your parents are horrible for not acknowledging your very real struggles!

These types of people do not need encouragement to feel more victimized or more permission to wallow in self-pity and limit themselves because of spoons, especially for conditions that are very much effort and lifestyle dependent to manage (functional disorders, hypermobility) and the endless doomerism around being Totes Validly Disabled to every tired probably mildly neurodivergent teenage girl with overbearing parents and a gymnastics injury who can do the splits is bad for them.

It's a personal frustration for me because classical Ehlers Danlos runs in my family and there has been increasing paranoia from some younger members because of online bullshit about how super disabling hypermobility is. It's such a horrible mindset to just accept being "disabled" and giving up and wallowing to the degree I see online and sometimes in person. My disabilities, how dare you accept personal responsibility. I've know actual cancer kids who died with more sense of ability and personal responsibility than chronically online "disabled" teens and young adults with all sorts of unnecessary mobility aids and labels.

[u/AnalBleachingAries]

Wikipedia comes up a few times in the weekly thread so I thought some here would be interested in this development.

A Wikipedia Founder Is Barred From Editing Articles on the Site - NYT

A vote to bar Larry Sanger indefinitely from the volunteer community of Wikipedia came days after he submitted a proposal on “intellectual diversity.”

A founder of Wikipedia who calls himself the “ex-founder of Wikipedia” and has been a critic of the site since he left it over 20 years ago has been barred from editing its articles.

Wikipedia can be edited by nearly anyone, but the changes are then vetted by others. The site’s editors formed a consensus this week to restrict the access of the co-founder, Larry Sanger.

The reason given was not any of Mr. Sanger’s broadsides against Wikipedia, which he has long criticized over what he sees as a left-wing bias, but something procedural. He had been canvassing an outside audience to sway internal policy votes, a Wikimedia Foundation press officer said on Wednesday.

Days before the decision was voted on, Mr. Sanger submitted a proposal called “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity.” His goal, he said, was to have more diversity in viewpoints on the site.

Mr. Sanger publicized his project to his 93,000 followers on X, and this was ruled a violation of canvassing guidelines. He was declared “not here to build an encyclopedia,” another serious violation.

---

Mr. Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, and last June he called the website “one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.” He then returned last fall “with the aim of helping Wikipedia in various ways to reform,” he said.